Saturday, 14 Feb 09
"The reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." - Albert Einstein
It was never really a question. I don’t know why I was surprised. But South Africa is totally different than anywhere I have ever been and is totally different from anything I expected. So, in my young two weeks here, the one thing I have learned about the continent of Africa, while living way down at the tiny, ego centric tip of it, the thing I have learned to my core, is that it belies all expectations.
From the hyper-tanned 60 year-old male reading Danielle Steele on First Glen Beach to the “temporary settlements” (i.e. townships) where white families in Volkswagons take their recycling and pay the woman standing there a few cents, to bbq’s called braais, to enormous, only-in-Africa sized boulders that shockingly and seamlessly join the beaches with their waters, to the gusting winds and the burning off of ageless mist around Lion’s Head Mountain, to aloes bigger than a car, the joining of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, the silhouettes of trees you know can only exist in Africa and sunsets that belie the location even more, to a diversity almost incomparable to anywhere, to the unending suffering of a country so deeply divided in strife and hatred, to an apartheid so painful and a society still struggling. It is a place of wonders, of mysteries, of legends, of stories, of whispers and of shouts, and I have yet to be here two weeks.
So, let me pause here. For those who are unaware, I am currently residing in Cape Town, South Africa. For the past five months I had been working as an editorial intern at Skiing Magazine in Boulder, Colorado. It was fantastic and engaging and educational and addicting and challenging, and I loved, loved, loved it. Unfortunately, the economy is… struggling. And the publishing world is not doing any better, even by a short shot. After searching for low level positions through every possible outlet and every connection I have made, even checking out a few unpaid internships, I was stuck. In Idaho. Broke.
Idaho is not a bad place to be. The sun was shining. There was skiing to be had. The snow had come and was about to come again. I had free ski passes abound. But without a goal, or a change, on the horizon, Idaho couldn’t have felt more like a trap. And serendipitously/luckily/extremely luckily/gratefully, on a snowy Sun Valley afternoon, some family friends asked me if I knew anyone who would be interested in coming with them to South Africa for three months to work as an “au pair” for their 3 year old. As you are all well aware, I am not one to pass up traveling and I wasn’t even going to let a too-full passport get in my way. And next to the well-being of their daughter, my employers'/friends' number one concern was my writing, that I had plenty of time to do it, that I had plenty of opportunity, and that I actually did it.
Ten days later, moved out of my house in Boulder and with 15 new pages sewn into my passport, I was on a plane to Seattle. Then a plane to Chicago. Then one to London. A fiery red and industrially pink sunset over London’s Heathrow. Then a long one to Johannesburg. And finally, to Cape Town. (The last a two-hour domestic flight on South African Airways, the airline currently investigated for drug trafficking, served me a full English breakfast, for free.)
And the South African landscape appeared slowly below me. At first through quietly dense clouds, different and more distant and more familiar than I have ever seen. You could almost smell them. The rivers snaked and the red dirt glowed. The expansiveness seemed to be glowing even as the plane headed for the coast and the landmass began to end. That expansiveness, that beginning and ending, spoke the words I already had in my head. This. Is. It. This is the beginning of it, of it all. And this could be my new beginning too.
Jet lag was not too bad. I got over it. Some things I did, helped. The frolicking with a wild 3 year old in the cold Atlantic waters helped. Took naps and stole daydreams in the shadows of the boulders that stand guard between the sand and the ocean were nice. Spent an extremely hot morning exploring the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens discovering the hundreds and thousands of indigenous plants and fynbos (fine bush specific to the region) and long winding drives through hilly Cape Town along roads like Kloofnek and Main Road and Lower Kloof Road. Explored the traditional and modern architecture, one element of many that makes this city so dynamic. Visited the local beaches in my neighborhood of Camps Bay, Bakoven Beach, Beta Road Beach, Camps Bay Beach, Clifton Beach (First, Second, Third and Fourth). Got extremely sun burnt in a tiny, unfortunate spot I missed during my first and hasty sunscreen application. Avoided (and was avoided by) buckies (aka pickup trucks) during my adventures in learning to drive on the other side of the road and on the other side of the car.
From Camps Bay, the beach community where I live, beyond the Twelve Apostles, the cliffy mountains that stand guard over Cape Town alongside Lions Head and Tabletop, and over the 'Nek, lies the City. The City Bowl. Observatory. The Gardens. Bo-Kaap. The Southern Suburbs. Observatory was described to me as Soho before the invasion, the West Village before the invasion, the Village at its prime. But just in the few hours I have yet spent there and the one street I walked, I know it is its own. A new friend (actually, an old friend's mom) went above and beyond the call of a new friend, drove across the city to pick me up one late afternoon and "showed me the light." Observatory is dark, soulful, mysterious, vibrant, dynamic, old, traditional, and modern. A tiny neighborhoods of cottages, connected only by poorly insulated walls and a few vines that creep over gates, make up bright homes on my guide, Mary's only-dark-in-the-visual-sense street. And following her up the street, through the parking lot where the attendants are teaching her Xhosa, I almost kept going along with my awe as she turned into a hole-in-the-wall called Cafe Ganesh. Owned by a local artist, Ganesh is almost indescribable. Reminiscent of lime green cafes in Paris and candle-lit grottoes in Seoul, the wall was black or blue or pink or covered with mismatched wall paper. It was adorned with traditional looking portraits of Mandela and Frida and Martin and BB and Bob, and accented with sketches of construction workers and beautiful women. A white neon-light lamp in the shape of a skull lit the far corner. The soft light that could only come from decade-old Christmas lights cascading around the room. Barely any of the chairs matched and they all scraped the floor when you moved. The menu was a beautiful canvas of a chalkboard. The air hang like mist or a willow tree or smoke. I ate Roti (Cape Malay tortilla-like wraps filled with four different veggie curries) and drank South African wine. Talk about soul.
I also visited the V & A Waterfront. The working waterfront/shopping mall/amusement park/amphitheater/street market/movie theater/the most visited tourist attraction in South Africa. The working fishing harbor was refurbished and refinished almost 20 years ago, though continuous additions seem to spring up as does ownership by a billionaire from Dubai. The tacky Victorian architecture, with the shabby fishing boats, and the numerous quartets of handsome, old black men on banjos, trumpets, basses, and guitars, long walkways, and shady trees actually serves for quite a nice atmosphere. The Crocs store I could do without...
Now, I sit on a long narrow deck, the sun setting in the Atlantic beyond the boulders and the beaches in front of me, the cool water breeze is wiping the hot African sun from my skin, a long-beaked bird in the tree next door calls to his brother, time creaks slowly through the open door, the sun burnt spot on my chest where sun screen didn’t quite reach itches slightly, and I think about my life. The places that it takes me, the people I get to love, and the world in which I have the privilege to be.
Love, Katie Matteson (pictures coming soon)
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